The use of insecticides alone, in particular, adulticides, is common in controlling beetle populations. Typically the insecticide is applied to the soil (as a larvacide) or as a spray on plants (as an adulticide), which the beetle populations would tend to destroy.
The widespread distribution of toxic insecticides for control of crop destructive insects has significant disadvantages. Despite the fact that most continuous corn is treated with insecticides for corn rootworm control, the pest is more prevalent than ever before. Also, conventional soil insecticide treatments are subject to biodegradation and the development of corn rootworm resistance thus decreasing their effectiveness and causing inconsistent performance. In particular, many insecticides are also toxic to birds and other wildlife. Also, current soil larvacides are used mainly in the form of granular or liquid formulations banded in or over seed rows, wherein such practices are major factors in soil and groundwater contamination, a major environmental problem facing the world today.
Furthermore, current insecticide (larvacide and adulticide) applications may have serious deleterious effects on beneficial insects such as lady beetles, lacewings and ground beetles. In other words, many adulticide applications normally decimate the populations of beneficial insects which assist in the control of pest species by predation and/or parasitization.
Finally, most current foliar insecticide applications/treatments require more than two applications per season for season long control, and this is environmentally and economically undesirable.
In view of the above numerous disadvantages and of increasingly greater demands for environmentally safer means to control beetle populations, it is desirable to provide novel compositions and methods for overcoming the above-described disadvantages.